Anthony Watts has an article about Richard G. Hendrickson, who is being honoured by the NOAA for watching the weather for 84 years. That's a very long time. Richard Hendrickson is now 101 years of age. He's been reporting weather at Bridgehampton, New York for the USA COOP network since he was just a lad of 18.
Congratulations, Richard. That's a long time of continuous service.
Richard Hendrickson is aware of global warming
The reason I'm writing this, apart from congratulating Richard Hendrickson, is because WUWT readers might be interested in the fact that he is concerned about global warming. He (or the journalist) might confuse the stratosphere with the troposphere, but he did say in a 2008 interview with the local paper:
We have polluted the stratosphere and because of that we have had warmer weather in the summer and milder weather in the winter and the potential of having heavy precipitation in the summer time increases– if not more rains, maybe they will be a little heavier than they have been in the past – you’ll notice your basement floods a little easier, your roof might leak a bit.
We are in a period in the cycle of global warming. We have polluted our stratosphere with our big factories and it will happen.
Adjusting data for time of observation
Anthony is determined to spoil Richard's celebration by complaining about how the weather station is not ideally sited and blames NOAA. Then he complains about data being adjusted. His headline (archived here, latest update here) was:
I wonder how this dedicated weather observer feels about having his readings adjusted by NCDC?
Anthony leaves that question for readers to wonder. He doesn't say that whether or not the readings have in fact been adjusted. Apparently it's sufficient to ask the question.
Anyway, I checked some of the records from NOAA. For the Bridgehampton weather station, the time of observation wasn't recorded until the late 1940s. Then up until May 2008, the observations were taken at 8:00 pm. From then till now they were taken at 8:00 am. So I think that Richard Hendrickson would be quite comfortable with the data being adjusted to allow for the change in time of observation, if nothing else.
Anthony Watts' petty peeve
One more thing. Anthony is most irate that the Director of NASA's GISS, Dr Gavin Schmidt, doesn't spend all his days and nights sitting at a computer terminal entering data for individual US weather stations in the NOAA's COOP network. I wonder does he know the scope of NASA's work? Does he know, for example, that NASA gets data from NOAA? If he is concerned about the GHCNV3 data, why does he complain about NASA and not about NOAA?
…NASA GISS run by Gavin Schmidt, can’t seem to find the time to get their data set current for Bridgehampton, as seen here, only going to 2012. You’d think Gavin could tear himself away from Twitter long enough to at least get the data updated, especially since this man is so dedicated to the task.
This is from the NASA web page:
Q. Does GISS deal directly with raw (observed) data?
A. No. GISS has neither the personnel nor the funding to visit weather stations or deal directly with data observations from weather stations. GISS relies on data collected by other organizations, specifically, NOAA/NCDC's Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) v3 adjusted monthly mean data as augmented by Antarctic data collated by UK Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) and also NOAA/NCDC's Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) v3b data.
Does Anthony Watts, weather station watcher extraordinaire, not know that little fact? Apparently not. Anthony Watts isn't just a spoilsport and wet blanket, he is an ignorant spoilsport and wet blanket. He doesn't hold a candle to Richard G. Hendrickson or Gavin Schmidt.
Update: From the WUWT comments
Anthony has pledged "More on all this in a later post." Will this be another broken promise? A couple of people pointed out to Anthony Watts that GISS uses NOAA data.
I also see that in addition to the change in time of observation, there has been a station move. Nick Stokes says, quoting Jim:
July 23, 2014 at 9:17 pm
jim says: July 23, 2014 at 9:08 pm “Absent any location or observer specific reasons for the GHCN adjustment of the recorded data from this observation site, the GHCN adjustments are just destruction of observation data.”
Why not try to find out, then?
The first thing you’ll find is that data is undestroyed. In fact, it is graphed in the page you refer to, which shows what is on the unadjusted file. And as the head post indicates, you can get the original docs on line.
But in fact if you look at the adjustment history, there is just one sustained change in the early 1980′s. And sure enough, the metadata tells you there was a station move around that time.
Added by Sou at around 3:30 pm AEST 24 July 14
Latest WUWT archive here, in which HW is quoted (paraphrased) :) 10:42 pm AEST 24 July 14
